1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical waveguide device for facilitating alignment of optical axes between a light source such as laser device and the optical waveguide device, an optical module including the optical waveguide device, and a method of aligning the optical axes thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
An optical module having an optical waveguide device generally requires optical coupling between a light source and an optical channel waveguide for optical waveguide function as well as desired functions, such as light modulation, wavelength filtering or optical combining/splitting.
The following Patent Document 1 discloses a technique in which a condenser lens is placed between a laser source and an entrance surface of an optical fiber in an optical communication module and optical axis error signals are obtained by wobbling the condenser lens with constant period and amplitude in X-direction or Y-direction using an actuator.
The related prior art is listed as follows: Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication (koukai) JP-2003-338795, A.
A optical input/output end face of optical waveguide devices generally has an area of as much as 1 mm×1 mm, in which a cross-sectional dimension of a channel waveguide for optical coupling is several micrometers square, being extremely smaller than the area of the entire device.
In case where the optical input/output end face of optical waveguide devices is raster-scanned to seek for the channel waveguide, it takes an extremely long time to scan it with a scanning pith of several micrometers.